Month: July 2016

It’s been nearly a year since I’ve been up to the Big Apple for a conference or technology show and once more the SPSNYC team without fail has pulled off a terrific show with a solid group of speakers and sponsors. This go round I had the privilege of presenting on a topic near and dear to my heart, good ole Office 365. The attendees of the session were incredible and engaging – nothing more as a speaker that I could have asked for (except perhaps more time)…

The Office 365 adoption story is one of continued evolution as new experiences come to be through Groups and Delve. What’s more interesting is when you begin to peal back the layers and begin working with capabilities such as the Office 365 Connectors within Groups to begin fostering information sharing with colleagues and team members that you might be working with.

In addition to presenting it was great to catch up with fellow technologists, speakers, MVPs and long time friends. Thanks to the SharePoint Saturday community for continuing to thrive and to Microsoft for continuing to support the community and its events! Look forward to seeing you all next year!

Nevertheless, if you’re here and you’re looking for the slides, look no further, they’re available here:

For the past five years or so, Intel Corporation has been building what they term the Next Unit of Computing or NUC for short. What is a NUC? It’s effectively a stripped down ultrabook computer that is housed within a small cube like box – think back to when Apple had their cube like tissue box computer but a little bit smaller If you’ve got an Amazon Fire TV unit, it’s similar dimensions though taller (stack 2.5 of them and you’ve got a NUC).

The NUC’s internals consist of a small form factor motherboard with processor, wireless card, bluetooth and video chip (in this case making use of Intel’s HD graphics chip that’s a part of the processor). As this is a “barebones” PC, you add in your memory and hard drive. In recent years there have been two options for NUC devices – one that provides for an m.2 SATA interface and one that provides for an m.2 SATA interface in addition to a standard SATA3 interface that we’ve all become accustomed to with 2.5″ SSD laptop harddrives.

For me, I went the way of picking up an i5 5th generation NUC a year ago. It works well with the m.2 SATA storage and memory. Caveat, I’ve got an additional m.2 external USB3 drive attached to it for additional storage space which for the most part works pretty well.

All in all, the NUC works great as a desktop that doesn’t require intense gaming or rendering resources and its low profile means that it doesn’t require me to have a tower below my desk (though I do in the form factor a of 4 bay QNAP NAS).